What?  An April Apocalypse?  Yep, after Thanksgiving last year, we decided to go ahead and do an apocalypse game again this spring so that we could do a test run of the 8th edition rules, and make time for Uncle Barry and the Orks to play.  This time around, it was Ian (Custodes), Uncle Clayton (Necrons), and I (Space Wolves and Knights) vs. Cody (Chaos), Keagan (More Chaos), and Uncle Barry (Orks).

I ran a lot of walkers again this time (six knights, 15 dreadnoughts, an Onager Dunecrawler, and two Kastelen Robots), but I also ran a lot of heroes – 12 Space Wolf characters, a mechanicus leader, and Leeman Russ!  This totaled just under 500 power points, and while my model count wasn’t high, I didn’t cluster my guys a lot, so I was involved in a lot of different conflicts – I did lots, but didn’t roll tons of dice every time.

I didn’t get any pictures of my pre-deployed force (woops!), but here are some pictures of the conflict as it was going on:

Shots of the temple battle:

The various melees:

Heroes face-off:

For this event, we test-drove the 8th edition rules, but also tried some alternative turn order ideas, namely, moving for both sides happened in a single phase, and shooting and psychic phases were simultaneous between the two sides.  While this was probably a bit more fair, the cadence was a bit chaotic, and I think contributed to people getting tired more quickly.  I also think the assault phase left a lot of us in a “meh” state, which was a bit of a bummer because three of us (Orks, Khorn, and Space Wolves) are melee heavy armies.  Overall, I think I like the 8th rules a bit better, but we will likely have to do some work on turn order play to get it to come out right.

I think my biggest misplay was continuing to think that Uncle Clayton was on the other team.  It seemed like every time we were talking or I was looking at the board, I thought the Necrons were against us, as I’m so used to being opposite uncle Clayton.  It was a good time though, and I was glad to have him on my team – his dudes backed me up more times than I can count!

The most epic moment of the match was the cascading explosion though – One of my knights put the final wound on Keegan’s Leviathan which exploded, and put enough wounds on my knight to destroy it…  …Which exploded, destroying a nearby transport…  …Which exploded…  …And didn’t quite get to the next vehicle in line.  It was pretty awesome though – with all the explosions, it made for a cool round of shooting.

However, I think it was a good test run, and will allow us to tune this better for the Thanksgiving game.  There will be more walkers then!